Mark Plays... Black Widow (Arcade)

Wed, 02/13/2013 - 4:51pm — Mark Vergeer

Black Widow is one of these shooters that has two joysticks to control the game the left one for movement and the right one for firing. It almost looks like Geometry Wars with a big Spider's Web yet this game is from 1982 and plays quite similar to Robotron or Smash-TV.

Well worth checking out as there are ports for the original Playstation, Playstation 2, PC, XBox, XBox360 and even the NGage got a port!
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Comments

Yes, Black Widow is a great game and there's lots of little strategies to improve your score if you can figure them out.

Here's a few;

The red bits of the web always work the same way - you can pass through them in one direction but not the other.

Don't bother shooting at the green-purple 'BugSlayer' - you can't harm it and it won't harm you either - even if you touch.

I noticed in the video that you shuffled some of the eggs around a bit, but they will actually give you a big bonus of you push them off the web, either over the outer edge or down the middle hole. You should absolutely do this with the eggs that becomes a 'Spoiler' - that's the dark red enemy, because it will hunt for you but you can't kill it, so it's better to get rid of it before it hatches.

On the bonuslevels (every 4th, where you get a bunch of enemies flying in formation) you'll get a bonus if you manage to shoot all of them, but you will also get another bonus if you survive the level without killing any of them.

Oh, and I've remade it, so if you want to play a version of the Black Widow in your PC or Mac, without using an emulator, you can. ;-)

One of the Rarer ATARI games, it was a conversion kit to go into some of Atari's other raster games. If i remember right it was put in SPACE DUEL or GRAVITAR cabs. As you mentioned its often compared to Robotron.. the difference is ATARI didnt have quite as robust joystick and the Black Widows where often broke in the arcades. The guy who designed it never did any other games (also kinda rare for that time). I alwasy felt it was a Reverse Tempest.. instead of the stuff coming out of the center , you whre in the center and stuff was coming in..